


convergence on a broken line

by ghostwriterofthemachine



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Captivity, Collars, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Rescue, Slavery, Ten Trails Whump Challenge, The Force, Violence, Whump, caged, general badassery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26776315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwriterofthemachine/pseuds/ghostwriterofthemachine
Summary: Anakin Skywalker, an 11-year-old slave two years separated from his mother, sees a caged man in front of a cantina, and hears whispers of a Jedi.Things spiral from there.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 33
Kudos: 475
Collections: Ten Trails Whump Challenge 2020





	convergence on a broken line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmeraldHeiress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldHeiress/gifts).



> So Whumptober seemed like Too Much for me, because I am small and busy and anxious, but [yuckwhump's](https://yuckwhump.tumblr.com/l) [Ten Trial's](https://yuckwhump.tumblr.com/post/629485275921383424/welcome-to-the-ten-trails-whump-challenge-and) challenge seemed much more doable and low-key, so I decided to jump onto that! I am going to aim to get 5 prompts done. I am also doing them all sorts of out of order, because I am a Mess.
> 
> This is for the prompt "collars," and really wasn't supposed to be this long, and also wasn't supposed to take place in this kinda weird AU, but alas!! 
> 
> Huge shout out to [EmeraldHeiress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmeraldHeiress/pseuds/EmeraldHeiress) and [AlabasterInk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlabasterInk/pseuds/AlabasterInk), for being great writing buddies/enablers in this challenge, and double for Ink in this case, for a quick and wonderful Beta read!!
> 
> Hope you all enjoy!

There is a man in a cage outside the cantina.

Anakin notices this as he’s running an errand for his Master, the late afternoon sunshine of Tatooine scorching hot. The parts he was sent to retrieve are heavy and his arms strain around the bag, but he knows better than to drag it and risk it breaking. 

The cage is a strange enough sight that it makes Anakin pause, and stop, and stare. He’s never been the kind of lucky child who got to be shielded from such things; slave-children are rarely considered to be  _ real _ children, and he isn’t unused to seeing people in bondage or restrained. But— well. Usually, slavers use cuffs. Ropes. Chips. 

Anakin hasn’t seen a person in a cage very often. Let alone a person as strange as the man inside of this one. 

The cage is too small for him— he’s sat with his knees folded up to his chin and his face hidden in his knees, his arms wrapped around himself. His hair is cut funny, all short except for the back, and his face is mostly hidden. Anakin can tell he’s been beaten, though. His eye looks swollen. And there is a strange, half-metal collar fastened tightly around his throat. 

This is another thing which Anakin is not unfamiliar with, because there are many reasons why you’d put a slave in a collar. Zygerrians are very fond of shock collars for all occasions, and plenty of the Hutts put collars on their dancers. But this doesn’t look like a shock collar, and it isn’t pretty like a collar you’d put on a dancer. It just looks tight. Painful. 

A passing merchant jostles Anakin harshly, and he nearly drops the ship part he has wrapped in his arms. He bites back the sharp reply he’d love to spit at him, because he’s 11 now and also alone and what little protection his age and his mother gave him in the past are gone. He quickly re-finds his footing. 

His eyes are drawn to the caged man again, and this time his heart jumps into his throat. The man has raised his head from where it was tucked. He’s looking directly at Anakin. Their eyes meet, and Anakin notes their strange gray color, and the intensity that they are directed at  _ him _ . There’s no one else the man could be looking at. 

And then someone kicks at the cage and the man breaks their eye contact to turn his face into his knees again. Anakin takes one step away, and then another, and then begins not-quite running to his destination, the ship part still heavy in his arms. 

He doesn’t know why he feels like he’s running away. 

.

That night, Anakin is curled in a chair in the corner of the main room in the quarters he shares with a few of the dancers. He was shoved in with them when he first arrived here, two years younger and sobbing for his mother, and the girls were ordered to ‘shut him the kriff up.’ While he’d been bought as a mechanic’s assistant, even the harshest of masters knew that a bad way to get back your investment was to house a 9-year-old among bitter, grown men. 

So, Anakin sits in the corner and watches the dancers do each other’s makeup and gossip amongst themselves. Sometimes they pass him and run a hand through his hair, like he’s a favorite tooka. 

Anakin is tired and far more absorbed in watching Forha, a long-limbed Twi’lek woman, ring liner around the eyes of Karin, a human girl who is only three or four years older than Anakin himself, than he usually is. His mind is wandering, which is why he jumps so hard when a cool hand lightly touches his shoulder. 

Zoya smiles soothingly at him, fingers spread wide to show she is no threat. Anakin relaxes. 

“Can you do me a favor, Aniya?” she asks him. She has a strange, opened-voweled accent, and she lets people know she likes them by doing that to their names— placing a ‘ya’ at the end, or at least a first syllable. Zoya is nice.

“What do you need?” he asks her, already sliding his legs out from under him. 

She smiles again and hands him a small vial of scented oil. “Take this and bring it to Vee at the Sandhawk. She’ll be in the back. If you ask for her by name they should let you in. She’s got a very particular client tonight — insists she wears this scent — but she forgot it here. You can do this for me, Aniya?” 

Anakin nods and tucks the vial into his pocket. “I can do that, Zoya.”

She taps his cheek affectionately, the same way Anakin’s mother used to. “Good boy,” she says, and goes over to the vanity herself. 

It’s only when Anakin is outside in the nearly-cool Tatooine dusk that he realizes that the Sandhawk is the same cantina the cage was outside, hours before. 

When he arrives, the cage is still there. Speeder bikes have been parked around it as if it is a perfectly normal object to be outside a cantina. The man has shifted position slightly, but he is still huddled in the center of it, not touching the bars, face hidden as best as he can. 

Anakin does not look at him when he passes. He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. He enters the loud, dim cantina as quickly as he can. There’s a stage for dancers at one end, and a bar at the other. There are a fair amount of locals scattered around, but also some people Anakin would guess are smugglers, a few he thinks are crew for some of the supply ships, and one group of very rowdy bounty hunters, right by the bar itself. 

He quickly crosses to the door next to the stage, tells the man who is half-heartedly guarding it that he’s here to give Vee the vial. The man looks at him, seems to take a moment of critical thought, and then waves him in. 

Vee is a Togrutan woman, about 18 standard, and she smiles gratefully at Anakin when he explains and hands her the vial. 

“Good, he’s always calmer when I have this.” She crosses to the vanity and dabs some on her pulse points. 

“They’re real loud out there,” Anakin comments, as a group he can identify as the bounty hunters let out a huge  _ whoop _ at something or other. 

“Yes,” says Vee, a note of passive disapproval in her voice. “One of the men from off-planet caught something alive that’s worth quite a lot, from what I can gather. They’ve been here all day, celebrating.”

Anakin hasn’t had much experience with bounty hunters, but he already knows that he doesn’t like them very much. He thinks about the man outside in the cage, no doubt the bounty she’s referring to. He nods along with Vee.

“You should get going,” she says to him, as another roar goes up from the bounty hunters. “Most likely, this will most likely only get worse from here. This is no place for a child.”

She ushers him to the door and squeezes his shoulder as she sends him out. The cantina seems even louder now, in comparison to the muffled dressing room. The divide between the bounty hunters at the bar and everyone else in the room seems to be getting larger and larger, and Anakin knows this is going to get ugly very soon. 

He starts to creep towards the front door, staying close to the walls. 

Another shout goes up from the bounty hunters. One of them grabs the wrist of the one closest to the center of the group and hauls his wrist into the air. 

“And here’s to Bolt Neely,” he cries out, voice slurred, “who just nabbed the bounty which is gunna let us all retire, and help wipe traitorous scum off the face of the galaxy! Long live the Empire, am I right?”

Anakin picks up his pace towards the door. The only things he knows about the Empire are that they generally leave places this far into the Outer Rim alone and, if you talk about them loud enough in a crowd, you are sure to make someone very, very angry, no matter what you say. Anakin doesn’t want to be in this place if people start to get angry. 

Bolt Neely yanks his arm out of the other’s hold. “Kriff the kriffing Empire,” he says, also slurring, “except for when it pays us a Serenno Duke’s ransom to give them some piece of Jedi crap so they can pull magic out of his head.”

Anakin freezes where he stood. A Jedi? There’s a Jedi here?

The man in the cage once again flashes behind his eyes. But he doesn’t have time to think about it any more, because the tension in the room is rising, and he knows when the safest thing to do is leave. Anakin slips out the door. 

And finds himself unable to  _ not _ think about the cage, because he’s looking at it. 

The man inside of it is still cramped and bent up within himself. As the door swings shut behind Anakin, he slowly lifts his head. 

It’s dark on the street, but their eyes meet again, and Anakin is confronted with the strange color for the second time that day. 

The man’s face looks even worse up close. One of his eyes is swollen almost completely shut, and there is a sluggishly bleeding wound on his temple. His lips are cut and cracked. His cheeks are molted with bruising. There is a strange stub of a ragged, thin braid hanging from around his right ear— it looks like someone took a serrated blade to it. The collar around his neck, with its strange mix of metal and fiber, seems to dig deeper into his skin than it should. 

“Hello there,” the man says, after a long moment of silence. His voice is low and wrecked. “You’re the little boy from earlier.”

Anakin can only stare. He feels oddly frightened. 

“Don’t mind the mess,” the man continues, his lips pulling into what must be a very painful smile. “I promise it looks worse than it feels.”

Anakin is fairly sure the man is lying, and he opens his mouth to say as much, but what comes out, hushed like a secret, is, “Are you a Jedi?”

The man’s face falls. The half-attempted smile slides off his face. Anakin almost wants to apologize, but the man answers him nonetheless. 

“Yes,” he says, as quiet as Anakin. “Yes, I am.”

Anakin’s heart pounds. He’s heard a lot of things about Jedi. The only other thing he really knows about the Empire is that it  _ hates _ Jedi; it killed off most of them already and is constantly hunting the others down. That must be why this man's bounty is so high. People who like the Empire say that the Jedi were traitors and evil and used magic to bend others to their will. 

But then other people, who like the Empire less, who speak in softer voices, say that the Jedi used to be heroes. They fought for good and kept people safe. They took down evil. They freed slaves.

The Empire didn’t care. The Empire killed them anyway and now they need to run. 

Anakin can remember his mother smoothing his hair back off his face, when he was small and couldn’t fall asleep and still with her, whispering the second kinds of stories to him. A faraway daydream of a Knight who came to help them free themselves. 

He knew what kind of stories he wanted to believe. 

“How did they catch you?” He asks the man — the Jedi. “Don’t you all have, you know, mind magic? And you can fly, right? And shoot lasers from your hands?”

The man huffs out a laugh. “We don’t have mind magic,” he says, gentle and sad. “At least, not the way you’re imagining. Not enough to help in a fight. And no flight, either, but we can jump very high in the correct circumstances. We can’t shoot lasers from our hands, though— well. Our weapons could make it look like we are, I suppose.”

“But that’s what people  _ say _ about Jedi,” Anakin nearly pouts. He’s spent a fair amount of time daydreaming about flying and laser hands. 

“Well,” says the man, measured, “I am sure people say a lot of things about slave boys which aren’t true either, hm?”

Anakin’s face falls. The Masters throw that in his face, too, and free men who run market stalls. He shoves his hands into his pockets. “I guess,” he says, and then turns on his heel to go. 

“No,” says the man. He nearly calls, speaking louder than he dared before. “No, I’m sorry, that was cruel of me. That was wrong. Forgive me, I’ve had...something of a trying few days.”

Anakin looks back. The man is looking directly at him, head turned in a strange angle to do so because of the height of the cage. 

Before he can think better of it, he plops himself down against the wall next to it. 

“No offense, mister,” Anakin says, “but you really look it.”

This makes the man huff out another pained-sounding laugh, which makes Anakin feel good for reasons he can’t really articulate. 

“My name is Anakin,” he says, sticking out his hand to shake. 

But the man doesn’t reach back, instead tensing up in fear and hissing, “Don’t get too close!” Once Anakin has pulled back his hand in reflex, he relaxes a fraction. “The bars are electrified,” he explains. 

Anakin balls his hand up close to his body, as if he’d already been shocked. He looks at the tiny cage, and the man’s position curled in the middle, with a new understanding. 

The man sighs at his expression. “My name is Obi-Wan,” he says. “You shouldn’t stay here, little one. They’ll be done with their drinking soon enough, and come out here to take it out on me. You shouldn’t be anywhere near that.”

And then he tucks his head back into his knees.

Anakin slumps heavier against the wall. He folds his arms across his chest and doesn’t answer. 

Anakin should leave. He’s already late enough getting back from the Sandhawk, and Zoya and the other girls are no doubt already worried about him. If he’s late enough to rouse suspicion from a foreman or, Stars forbid, his Master, he risks his chip being activated without hesitation. But still, Anakin can’t seem to make himself leave. 

They are quiet for a long second. 

“Well?” Anakin prods at the man in the cage— Obi-Wan. “How’d they catch you? If you can jump real high and you have a laser weapon. If I had those, I don’t think I’d ever be caught.”

Obi-Wan’s swollen eyes flutter open. “I,” he says, and then stops. “My— my family, I suppose, needed to get away.” When he finally continues, his voice is hoarse. “And I was in a position to help them escape, if they only— well. If they left me behind.” The smile he smiled was bitter. “And I didn’t give them much of a choice, once I understood that.”

Anakin’s heart twists painfully. He can feel the phantom of his mother’s hand in his hair. “But. But, if you have all those powers, why don’t you get out now?” Anakin hates how young he sounds, but he can’t help the question. “If you can jump high, you must be able to do other things, right? Use your magic to get out of the cage.”

Obi-Wan almost smiles at him. His arm uncurls itself from around his knees, and he taps at the ugly collar, its mess of metal and fabric parts. “This,” he says, something deeply sad in his voice. “They invented these to hurt us. It stops me from— being able to do all of those things.”

Anakin says, “Oh,” because, now that he’s thinking about it, that makes sense. If so many people were after Jedi, there must be many ways to catch them. 

Obi-Wan looks as if he might say something else, but his head snaps up and to the door and his eyes darken. 

“Go,” he hisses, voice suddenly the barest whisper. “Go, you need to hide _ now.” _

Anakin is used enough to that tone of voice that he obeys it without question. He darts from his seat against the wall and dives into the shadows around the parked speeders, crouching there and going motionless. Obi-Wan tucks his head into his knees and makes himself small again. 

The door to the Sandhawk bursts open from the inside, and the bounty hunter from the bar stumbles out. He’s the one who was named, Bolt Neely, who is dressed in piecemeal armor and has a device strapped to his wrist. 

“Still alive there, traitor?” he sneers at Obi-Wan. He’s drunk enough that he has to lean heavily against the wall. “One of the boys got it up in his head that you’d died out here.”

Obi-Wan says nothing. Doesn’t even flinch.

“Hey, freak,” Bolt Neely says again. He fiddles with the device on his wrist. The bars of the cage turn a slightly different color, and he pulls his boot back and kicks at them. The cage shakes violently. “Hey, talk to me. Show me you’re alive. We’re taking bets inside and I wanna win.”

Obi-Wan moves his hands then, from wrapped around his knees to crossed over the back of his neck, as if to protect it. Bolt Neely laughs. 

“There you are. You  _ are _ alive. Good, they pay double if you're alive. They wanna get information outta you, right? Hunt the rest of you down?” He pulls his foot back as if to kick the cage again. 

Anakin makes a decision then, and it’s one he’ll have a hard time explaining in the future. Maybe it’s some long-buried instinct clawing its way up to the surface. Maybe something whispers to him that it’s a good idea. 

_ Maybe _ , Anakin thinks, as he wraps his hand around a good-sized rock and flings it at the bounty hunter’s head with an accuracy he didn’t know he possessed, he just thinks one person should get to be with their family. 

The rock collides with Bolt Neely’s temple. He freezes in place, one foot pulled back, a monument of cruelty stuck in a moment of surprise. 

And then he crumples to the ground, still as the desert at high noon. 

Anakin pops out of the shadows and hurries over to the fallen body. Obi-Wan is unfolding himself and, once he sees the color of the bars and the scene beyond them, flings himself forward. 

“What are you  _ doing? _ ” he hisses, hands clutched around the bars. 

“I’m getting you out,” Anakin says matter-of-factly. On instinct, he checks around the fallen man’s neck. A key is hanging there by a chain, and Anakin yanks it off. 

“You’re going to get yourself in trouble,” says Obi-Wan, even though Anakin can see the longing in his eyes as he approaches the cage with the key. 

“Don’t worry about it,” says Anakin, with a carelessness he doesn’t feel, because Obi-Wan isn’t wrong. He could get himself in the worst kind of trouble for this. But he finds he can’t care anymore. 

He fits the key in the lock, fiddles with it until it opens. He swings the door wide and offers a hand to help Obi-Wan out. 

Obi-Wan leaves the cage gingerly. He tests his feet against the ground before putting weight on them, forcing himself upright. Anakin can almost hear his joints, forced into one position for too long, creaking. 

“I somehow doubt that,” he says, and allows Anakin to help him stand. Even with how much he is bracing, Obi-Wan’s hand on his shoulder is gentle, if shaking slightly.

“No, no, it’s fine. No one even really knows I’m here, honest, and the girls who do will cover for me. I should be—”

And then the cantina door is flung open. A drunken, slurring voice calls out, “Boss, what’s keeping you—” only to be cut off by an angry, wordless screech. 

“Damn and blast it all to a Sith-fucking mother’s basement—” Obi-Wan grits out, and then Anakin feels the hand on his shoulder move to his wrist, and then suddenly they are both running. 

Anakin takes the lead, directing them down one dark alley and then through a sharp turn into another one. He can hear the sounds of pursuit behind them. Obi-Wan twists, hissing in pain as he does, and knocks a stack of crates in their way. From the sound of it, that doesn’t slow them down very much.

A blaster bolt zings past them as they fly around the next corner.

“Stop,” Obi-Wan grits out. “Stop, we’re never going to outrun them.”

“No offense, mister, but we gotta” Anakin bites back. 

Obi-Wan might have something else to say, but he never gets the chance to say it— his knees buckle under him as they pull level to a storefront. The sudden loss of momentum sends Anakin careening into the ground as well. He scrambles up to his hands and knees and dives back for Obi-Wan’s hand, pulling as hard as he dares. 

The side-street is empty, at this time of night. The sounds of running feet and angry shouting are getting closer. 

Anakin pulls on his hand again.  _ “They’re right behind us.” _

“I know,” Obi-Wan says. He struggles to his feet, and it’s only then that Anakin notices that he isn’t wearing any shoes. His feet are torn up and bleeding sluggishly. 

Obi-Wan slips his hand out of Anakin’s. He does not start to run again. 

Anakin feels like he’s going to cry. “ _ What are you doing?” _

Obi-Wan hums. He picks up a broom, which is leaning against the doorway of the storefront. Under Anakin’s astonished gaze, he uses the wall as leverage to snap the bristle part at the bottom off. “Something ill-advised, I am sure.” 

The broom handle is made of some light, hollow piece of metal. Obi-Wan limps to the center of the street. He swings the handle back and forth a few times, twists it back and forth, testing the balance. 

“This will have to do,” he says. He shifts his grip so it’s about a hands-width apart at the center and holds it near his core, letting out a a long, slow exhale. 

Anakin realizes what he’s planning in a sudden, horrified rush. “You’re crazy,” he says, as he finally stumbles to his feet. “You’re going to get us both  _ killed.” _ And really, Anakin should flee and leave him here now, but for some reason he can’t make himself. 

“Probably, to your first point,” says Obi-Wan, serene around his split lips. “And no, I won’t. I promise you.”

And then  _ he shuts his eyes. _ He inhales deeply through his nose, then slowly out of his mouth. He does it again. 

He starts whispering something under his breath, in a language Anakin doesn’t recognize. 

_ “Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoh'al,” _ he says, slow and reverent and seemingly just for himself.  _ “Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoh'al.” _

And then the bounty hunters crash around the corner. There are 7 of them.

Obi-Wan opens his eyes. 

And he  _ moves. _

A whirl of motion, sharp and fluid, a knife made of the wind from a sandstorm. He strikes out once with the end of the broom handle, nailing the first bounty hunter in the center of the throat. He crumples like flimsi, and Obi-Wan strikes with the other end to nail the only woman in the temple. 

Anakin notices that, even as he dances through the fight, Obi-Wan is leaving streaks of blood on the sand wherever he steps. 

One of the larger men lunges at him, and Obi-Wan goes low, hitting his shins as if the handle was a battering ram and bracing his shoulder against the man’s solar plexus. He flips over Obi-Wan and into one of his companions. They both go down and don’t move. 

Anakin is so entranced by this, he hasn’t noticed one of them, the slimmest of the group with a bandana tied over the bottom half of his face, has been coming straight towards him the whole time. 

By the time Anakin does notice, he is far too close. He has a wicked serrated blade and an awful, crooked little grin, and he steps towards Anakin slowly and deliberately. Like he knows that, no matter how small he is, Anakin is smaller. 

Many people have looked at Anakin like that, in the past. It nearly always means pain.

Anakin takes a fumbling step back. His eyes dart over to Obi-Wan, who is trapped and absorbed in combat with the other two bounty hunters still standing. He takes another step back. Falls backwards and is on the ground again. 

From down here, the man looks even taller. He twirls the knife around his fingers. He draws it back. 

Anakin reacts. He fists his hand into the street, collects a handful of sand, and  _ flings _ it into the man’s face. 

The man clutches his eyes, cursing, and Anakin bounds to his feet. The man is already straightening up again, the knife pointed back towards his throat, his ugly little mouth twisting into something hateful, and Anakin— 

Anakin— 

Anakin does not want this man to touch him. Anakin is so tired of people touching him. 

But he has no weapon and he has no size and Obi-Wan, his only ally, is outnumbered and injured and far away. 

The man reaches.

Anakin flings out his hands on instinct and— 

And the man flies across the street. He crashes into a merchant’s stand and does not stand up again. 

Anakin stares blankly at where the man used to be standing. When he glances over to where Obi-Wan and the other bounty hunters are, he sees they are doing the same thing. The two hunters are staring at the heap of their colleague, and Obi-Wan— 

Well. Obi-Wan is looking at him with something like wonder in his eyes. 

They’ve also all stopped moving. Anakin barely thinks before he’s taking advantage of it, and running directly at the legs of the closest one in the kind of side-tackle which used to put Kit on his back, when they were young and together and allowed to play such games. 

It’s the last thing anyone is expecting which, in a fight, is never a bad thing. Obi-Wan snaps into motion again. 

Within moments, both of the bounty hunters are unmoving. 

Obi-Wan and Anakin stand there, panting, collecting themselves. The cut on Obi-Wan’s temple has begun to bleed sluggishly. The street is dotted with the blood from his feet. 

He is looking at Anakin again. 

“Well,” he says, as he catches his breath. “Perhaps there was a reason I ended up here after all.”

Anakin says nothing. He is clenching and unclenching his fists, and looking at the seven bodies on the ground. 

“We need to get off the street,” Obi-Wan says. “Do you know a place we can go?”

Anakin does. 

.

The mechanic’s shop is abandoned at this time of night. During the day, Anakin stands in the corners here, and does what he is bidden. At night, by the light of the double moons through the window, it’s almost pretty. 

Obi-Wan is ripping strips off his already-ragged cloak, more a rag than anything, and tying them around his feet in something between bandages and wrap shoes. 

“So, you think what I did,” Anakin asked quietly, “was use the Force?”

“Yes.” He smooths the bandages out. 

“And the Force is what gives you your Jedi magic?”

“Not...quite,” Obi-Wan says, “but that’s a basic enough understanding for now, yes.”

Anakin fiddles with his fingers, eyes on the ground. He doesn’t know what to do with that. 

“We need to get off-planet,” Obi-Wan mutters. He ties off the last strip of fabric. “We can’t pay for that, obviously, not to mention any half-decent hunter will be looking for me within the hour—”

Anakin has slowly looked up. He stares at Obi-Wan. “What?”

“I said we need to get—”   
  
“No, I mean—” Anakin’s voice is very small. “... _ we?” _

Obi-Wan’s eyes go wide. “Well,” he says. “Yes. I had assumed we would escape together. So you could be free. It’s the least I can do. But, of course,” he trips over his own words, “you don’t  _ have _ to come with me, if you don’t want to. If you have things to stay for here. I shouldn’t have assumed. You probably have family, and—”

“No,” Anakin chokes, “No, no family. Not anymore.” His mother, if Watto was to be believed, wasn’t even on Tatooine anymore. 

Obi-Wan’s eyes soften. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

Anakin ignores the softness, before it brings up emotions he doesn’t have time for right now. “It doesn’t matter. I want to, I want to go with you—”

“And so you will—”

“But I can’t, I  _ can’t _ , I’ll die, they’ll  _ kill me.” _

Obi-Wan stops for a long second, before his eyes slowly darken. 

“Oh, dear one,” he says, and something in Anakin’s chest twists at the tone of voice he says it in. “A chip. You have a chip. Of course you do. Of course. Monsters and scum, all of them.” He rests his forehead against his knees and breathes heavily through his nose a few times. “Force,” he says through his teeth. “Force, it could have gone off at any time, if the wrong person had seen. That was so dangerous for you. You should have never—”

“But it’s okay,” Anakin interrupts. “It’s okay, nothing happened. I couldn’t just leave you there. It felt wrong. I want you to go back to your family. But— but you can’t take me with you, cause of the chip. You gotta leave me here.”

To his death, possibly, though Anakin is trying very hard not to think about that. Maybe nobody saw him. Maybe, if they did, he could beg to his Master that he’d been under weird Jedi mind magic. 

But Obi-Wan is staring at him with a hardness in his eyes. A glint. He is breathing very deeply again. 

“Okay,” he says. He rests his eyes shut, and it makes the bruises look worse. “Okay. I think I have a way to get us both out of this.” He runs his fingers over the collar tight around his throat. “But I need you to get this off of me.”

Anakin opened his mouth. “Off your neck?” he squeaked, somewhat stupidly. 

“Yes. I need to feel— I need access to the Force, if this is going to work. And I can’t do that, with this thing on me.”

Anakin stares at the offending object. It really is distressingly ugly. Now that they are closer, and not running for their lives, Anakin can see the angry cuts slicing into Obi-Wan’s throat, where it digs in. “Can— Can I just cut it off?”

“I’m not sure,” says Obi-Wan. His eyes are still closed. “Sometimes they have bombs in them.”

Anakin must look horrified because, when Obi-Wan opens his eyes, he laughs. “I don’t think this one does. Bomb collars usually look like bomb collars, and combining Force suppressants and bomb collar usually looks even worse than this one does.” Anakin does not quite relax, and Obi-Wan continues. “You need a special type of metal to cut it, though. Something that can cut that— what’s it called, the hyperdrive metal—” 

“Talifrinium,” Anakin says. 

“Yes. That. Is there anything that can cut through that here?”

Anakin nods, and Obi-Wan smiles at him. “You seem hesitant.”

“I don’t—” His throat feels tight. He clears it. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t think you will. Actually, taking the collar off shouldn’t be the problem. The rest of it...well, that is up to me.” 

Anakin still isn’t sure he likes the sound of that, but he goes to get the snips that can handle talifrinium. When he returns with it, Obi-Wan has settled himself into a cross-legged position on the floor. He indicates that Anakin should sit down across from him, and Anakin does. 

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Obi-Wan says. He speaks carefully, precisely, as if he’s not moments away from falling over. “You are going to cut the collar off, and I will regain my connection to the Force. Because I have been unable to feel it for—” he shifts uncomfortably, “a fair amount of time now, reconnecting to it is going to be intense. I am going to channel that power, from the moment of reconnection, into your body to find and disable the chip.”

“J-Just disable it?”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan looks sympathetic. “But as soon as we get someplace with a medical droid, we will take it out for real, alright?”

Anakin hesitates. Because he shouldn’t trust, he should know better. This could be a trap he is walking directly into. And yet, it doesn’t feel like one. 

“Yes,” he says finally. “Alright.”

“Good. When we finish with this, there’s a good chance I’ll be— out of it, for lack of a better word. But I will be fine. It will seem worse than it is. You just get us to the shipyard. You get us there, and I’ll do the rest. Alright, Anakin?”

Anakin’s heart pounds. “Y-Yes.”

“Good.” Obi-Wan releases a breath. “Begin whenever you feel comfortable.”

Anakin slowly closed the space between them. Maneuvering the snips under the collar is a far more invasive and painful process than Anakin would have liked, with how tight it sits against Obi-Wan’s skin, but Anakin gets it there. 

“Ready?” he asks. 

Obi-Wan is breathing slowly and evenly, in through his nose and out through his mouth. He isn’t moving his head at all. “Yes,” he says. 

Anakin squeezes the snips and cuts off the collar. 

Obi-Wan seizes immediately, his head snapping back, his eyes opening wide and dilated towards the ceiling. Anakin would have fallen backwards, except Obi-Wan moves at an unearthly speed, hands on his shoulders. 

Obi-Wan’s hands move down his arms. They aren’t touching, just hovering a few inches above the skin. They trace the outline around his body. Obi-Wan is still looking straight up and staring, unseeing, at the ceiling. 

One hand stops on his left side, just below his rib cage. Obi-Wan’s neck snaps forward, and he is looking straight at Anakin again, but Anakin doesn’t think he’s seeing him. The hand touches that place below his ribs, and Obi-Wan begins to chant in a whisper, eyes falling shut as he did. 

“ _ Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoh'al,”  _ he says, and he presses his hand down. He keeps repeating that, over and over, the hand on Anakin’s ribs growing warm. 

And then, suddenly, Anakin becomes aware of a...lack, of some kind. A buzzing in his ears he could never quite put a finger on, suddenly gone. 

Obi-Wan’s hand falls away. His entire being goes slack, and Anakin is only just able to stop himself from falling to the ground. 

“It’s— done,” Obi-Wan breathes. “It’s done. It won’t blow.”

And Anakin— Anakin doesn’t have time to process and understand the enormity of that statement. Not right now. Not when he has a job to do. 

He gets Obi-Wan to his still-bleeding feet, lets him lean heavily on him. 

“We need to get to the shipyard,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan can only nod heavily as Anakin begins to guide them there. 

.

No one stops them on their way to the shipyard. It’s dark and they’re near the bars, and they are easily mistaken as a favored boy guiding his drunken master home after a night of indulgence. 

The yardmaster gives them a good, hard stare, but Obi-Wan waves a hand in front of his face. “You didn’t see us,” he says, voice hoarse. 

“I didn’t see you,” the yardmaster echoes, letting them pass. 

“I thought you said you didn’t have mind magic,” Anakin protests. 

Obi-Wan snorts. “I’ll explain later.” 

They find a larger ship with a shuttle thar detaches, and has enough space and rations for two people for at least a week. Obi-Wan waves his hand a few more times, and makes a few more statements _ (‘This shuttle needs to go in for repairs. You are very concerned about it’), _ and then they’re aboard.

And Obi-Wan is pulling them into space. 

And Anakin’s chip doesn’t activate. 

Anakin feels his throat tighten up. He looks out of the window and, for the first time, he sees Tatooine from a distance. It is round and tan and brown. He thinks about Zoya and Vee and the other girls. He hopes they’ll be okay. 

Obi-Wan collapses to the floor. He waves off Anakin’s concerns, even as he speaks in between high little wheezes. 

“Read me,” he says, “the date. The Standard date.”

Anakin does. 

“Good. Good. That’ll still be...punch in this code, to the communicator.”

He speaks out a string of letters and numbers. Anakin does and pretends his hands aren’t shaking. The code activates a frequency. 

“Now punch in this code,” Obi-Wan continues, and recites another string of letters and numbers. Anakin does so again, and sends it through the frequency. 

Obi-Wan staggers to his feet and nearly falls onto the ship's control panel. He sets the autopilot to some planet on the Mid-Rim Anakin has never heard of, and then activates the hyperdrive.

And they jump away from Tatooine. 

Obi-Wan then limps over and collapses into a medical cot, set up in the area next to the cockpit. He curls onto his side. 

“I will be—” he forces out of his mouth, “unresponsive, for a day or so. Don’t worry. Normal. Healing...trace. Jedi magic.” His lips twitch up, even as his eyes fall shut. “Anything you need...take it. Food, ‘fresher, clothes. Whatever. I should be awake well before we land. If there’s...problem...significant pain should wake me up.” 

Anakin watches Obi-Wan’s body begin to go eerily still, save for his deep breathing. Strangely, he feels no fear.

“And...Anakin?  _ Thank you.” _

.

Obi-Wan sleeps for two and a half days, and they arrive at their destination on the fourth. The third day they spend talking, and not talking, and treating wounds. 

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. Once I am back with my people, we can take you anywhere you want to go. You’re free now, really and truly,” Obi-Wan offers. His eyes look better, when they’re not swollen. “But you are strong in the Force, Anakin, that’s how you did all those things you did to get us away. If you wanted to train with us, stay with us, I am sure you could.”

It is all a bit much for Anakin, who manages to say, “I want to find my mom,” because he does, with an aching he can’t verbalize. 

Obi-Wan smiles at him. “Who says you can’t do both?”

They reach their destination, that Mid-Rim planet, on the fourth day, when Anakin is in the cockpit, watching the stars go by, and Obi-Wan is in the back, re-bandaging his feet. The comm bursts to life so suddenly that Anakin is startled, and jumps backwards. 

A voice is repeating something in a language that Anakin does not know, and it takes him only a moment to recognize it as the same language Obi-Wan said his mantra in:  _ Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoh'al. _

_ I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.  _

He senses Obi-Wan enter the cockpit, and watches him nearly dash to the comm. The man listens for a long second, and then laughs a strangled laugh. When Anakin looks at his face, he is surprised to see tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. 

_ “Haj dai, Jaieh,” _ he responds into the comm.  _ “Enoah qa fehl. Enoah qa fehl.” _

There is a long, long silence. And then the voice on the other end barks an order, and disconnects. Obi-Wan laughs again. 

“We have landing coordinantes,” he says, and he’s smiling so brightly that Anakin can’t help but smile back. 

They land the ship and begin to limp off onto the planet’s surface. Anakin looks around, entranced, at the lush green forest and lake they’d landed next to. A cool breeze touches his cheek, and he touches his skin with his fingers. He’s never felt anything like it. 

And then two people emerge from the trees. One takes off towards them at a run. 

“Obi-Wan,” he calls, voice deep and accented and haunted.  _ “Obi-Wan.” _

Obi-Wan makes a strangled noise and rushes forward to meet them. 

The running man arrives first. He is wearing a loose-fitted poncho, has long, gray-brown hair tied halfway back, and a weathered face. That face is currently twisted with so many emotions it hurts Anakin to look at him, and his eyes are fixed only on Obi-Wan.

He reaches out, catches Obi-Wan by the elbows, pulls him close— not an embrace, but far into his space, close enough to circle in his arms if he wanted to. “Obi-Wan,” he says again, quiet and reverent. “Oh, Obi-Wan.”

He looks him over, cataloguing the damage. His fingers trace Obi-Wan’s still-swollen face with careful fingers, catching at the sheared-off braid which Obi-Wan refused to let Anakin fix with some soul-deep sadness. He cups Obi-Wan’s face, so tender that it makes Anakin’s breath catch, and leans in to press their foreheads together. 

“You’ve returned to me,” says the man, “from the grave.”

Obi-Wan laughs, and it’s almost a sob. “No, not the grave, _Jaieh”_ he says. “Just Tatooine.”

The man laughs too. His fingers stroke over Obi-Wan’s cheekbones, as if he’s afraid he’ll vanish from beneath his hands. 

“And who is your companion?”

The second man has finally arrived. He is tall and dark and bald, and he has an unsmiling face, but not really a scary one. He is dressed in the same strange mix of clothing the other man is, loose fabric and ponchos and cloaks. Something seems concealed on his belt. 

Obi-Wan pulls away from the man who is embracing him. He turns back to Anakin and he smiles, and he is so much more  _ right _ like that, standing straight and smiling and not in a collar or a cage.   
  


Anakin wonders if he looks more right now, too. 

“This,” says Obi-Wan, “is Anakin.” He reaches out a hand to him. 

And, after a moment’s hesitation, Anakin steps forward and takes it. 

**Author's Note:**

> I am physically incapable of not putting the [Dai Bendu conlang](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885129) I am helping make into fic, so here are the translations:
> 
>  _"Tonbrei enoah foh midaial ru enoah dai mifoahl:"_ I am one with the Force and the Force is with me
> 
>  _“Haj dai, Jaieh, enoah qa fehl. Enoah qa fehl:"_ Yes, Master, it is me. It is me. 
> 
> _"Jaieh:"_ Master, as in 'earned mastery in the order
> 
> Also appearing in this fic is my far-dumber Space Russian accent, because I'm a menace. 
> 
> So yeah, in this AU the Empire rose to power 10-ish years before it did in canon, for Reasons, so now you have on-the-run!nomadic Jedi which is an idea I've had in my head for way too long, tbh. 
> 
> I have some other vague ideas for this verse (Anakin and Obi-Wan are brothers! they rescue Shmi! Secret clandestine meetings with other Jedi!), so maybe that'll show up at some point. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! Have a great day :D


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